Alison Elizabeth Taylor
Issue #20
The NYC artist puts comics on hold to focus on "manscapes"
By Valerie Palmer
Published: June 1st, 2004 | 12:00am
Male painters throughout history have made ample use of the female form, so why don’t more female painters use men as their subjects?
A couple of years ago Alison Elizabeth Taylor found herself asking the question, “Why is it girls always paint other girls?” and embarking on a series of paintings of men in their underwear, or her “manscapes,” as she fondly refers to them. Her initial intent was to objectify her subjects, but that didn’t quite work out. “My men just stared back at me from the page and I felt sorry for them,” she explains. In fact the entire process gave her a new empathy that she didn’t expect. “I mean, I was raised on feminism and am well aware of all the negative effects our culture has on women,” she says. “But I had never really thought about all the problems men go through.”
The 31-year-old artist grew up in what she calls “the cultural void that is Las Vegas” and moved to Los Angeles in 1996 to attend Art Center College Of Design. She went on to make a name for herself in the world of comics with her self-publishing venture, Hardcut Publishing. After putting out her own titles like the Synthetic Universe series and The Perfect Job, Taylor has put her comics on hold for now in order to concentrate on graduate studies at New York's Columbia University, where she’s been studying painting since last fall.
The wonderful narrative quality of her art is especially evident in her Women In the Southwest series — contact-paper inlays that she began as an ode to life on the West Coast, a lifestyle very different from the one she’s found in New York. Many of these works deal with the calm before the storm in female relationships. “I’m interested in the tension boiling beneath the surface right before a big conflict erupts — that moment before things come out, when the situation could still go either way, and all the anxiety and uncertainty involved," Taylor explains.
One thing that’s certain is Taylor’s talent. Her work has been shown at Baltimore’s American Museum of Visionary Art and at Los Angeles galleries like New Image Art, ACME, and Track 16. She’ll also be showing at Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York this summer. Not bad for someone who was kicked out of painting class in high school. “The teacher and I didn’t see eye to eye on things,” she laughs.
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